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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2014

Eli Rubin
Eli Rubin*
Affiliation:
Western Michigan University
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Extract

The essays in this special issue all focus on the city of Berlin, in particular, its relationship with its margins and borders over the longue dureé. The authors—Kristin Poling, Marion Gray, Barry Jackisch, and Eli Rubin—all consider the history of Berlin over the last two centuries, with special emphasis on how Berlin expanded over this time and how it encountered the open spaces surrounding it and within it—the “green fields” (grüne Wiesen) referred to in the theme title. Each of them explores a different period in Berlin's history, and so together, the essays form a long dureé history of Berlin, although each of the essays in its own way explores the roots of Berlin's history in deeper time scales, from the early modern period, to the Middle Ages, and even to the very end of the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , June 2014 , pp. 221 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2014 

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References

1 The term grüne Wiesen (“green fields”) is shorthand often used in German, especially among urban planners, for undeveloped, open areas outside population centers. In this essay, it is used to reflect the multiple themes of marginal spaces, nature, and tabula rasae along the borders of Berlin.

2 It should be noted that in the medieval and early modern eras, the Spree and Havel rivers were large enough to handle a significant amount of trade, and that the Spree and Havel do connect to the Elbe River and thus to Hamburg and the North Sea; Berlin is also relatively close to the Oder River. Still, it bears consideration as to why a city such as Szczecin, or Wrocław, or even Hamburg, did not then become the economic and political megacity that Berlin did.

3 Norman Davies made this point on behalf of Poland, which shares the same geological features as Berlin, in Davies, Norman, God's Playground: A History of Poland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 24Google Scholar.

4 Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 76Google Scholar.

5 Here the term “parallel history” is borrowed from Kate Brown's work on Richland, Washington, and Ozersk, U.S.S.R., during the Cold War in Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

6 Richie, Alexandra, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1999), 161Google Scholar.

7 Scheffler, Karl, Berlin. Eine Schicksalstadt (Berlin: E. Reiss, 1910)Google Scholar, citation here comes from Richie, Faust's Metropolis, 1. This is a point that has been made in other places as well, including Fritzsche, Peter, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 9Google Scholar.

8 Andreas Huyssens has made a similar point in his essay “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 57–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 59–60.

9 Ribbe, Wolfgang's edited opus, Geschichte Berlins, 2 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988)Google Scholar, is an exception because it goes into a much “deeper” history, devoting great detail to every era of Berlin's history, from its prehistory to the present, and exploring not only political events or popular culture, but also everyday life and economic and social developments as well.

10 Fest, Joachim, Der Untergang. Hitler und das Ende des Dritten Reiches (Berlin: Fest, 2002)Google Scholar; Kershaw, Ian, The End: Hitler's Germany, 1944–45 (New York: Allen Lane, 2011)Google Scholar; Kershaw, Ian, Hitler: Nemesis 1936–1945 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000)Google Scholar; Evans, Richard, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 2010)Google Scholar; Beevor, Anthony, The Fall of Berlin, 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2003)Google Scholar; and Moorhouse, Roger, Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler's Capital, 1939–1945 (London: Bodley Head, 2010)Google Scholar.

11 Gleber, Anke, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

12 Fritzsche, Reading Berlin; Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk; Ward, Janet, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Huyssens, Andreas, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Hake, Sabine, Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Webber, Andrew J., Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

13 To be fair, Fritzsche's Reading Berlin is intended only to focus on the city as a text and does not purport to be an all-encompassing history or description of the city. Several other works on Berlin also focus on the spectacle of the street life. See Huyssens, “The Voids”; Loberg, Molly, “The Streetscape of Economic Crisis: Commerce, Politics, and Urban Space in Interwar Berlin,” Journal of Modern History 85, no. 2 (June 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ward, Weimar Surfaces.

14 Ladd, Brian, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

15 Maciuika, John V., “Whose Schlossplatz? Architecture and the ‘Materialization’ of German Identities in Berlin's Historic Center, 1945–2009,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., Supplement 7 (2011): 15–28Google Scholar. Till, Karen, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)Google Scholar. See also Penny, H. Glenn III, “The Museum für Deutsche Geschichte and German National Identity,” Central European History 28, no. 3 (1995): 343–372CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maier, Charles, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Till, Karen, “Verortung des Museums. Ein geo-ethnographischer Ansatz zum Verständnis der sozialen Erinnerung,” in Geschichtskultur in der Zweiten Moderne, ed. Breier, Rosmarie (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000)Google Scholar; Berdahl, Daphne, “Re-Presenting the Socialist Modern: Museums and Memory in the Former GDR,” in Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics, ed. Pence, Katherine and Betts, Paul (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 345–366Google Scholar. More generally, see Sabrow, Martin, ed., Erinnerungsorte der DDR (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009)Google Scholar; and Huyssens, Present Pasts.

16 There is a voluminous literature on the politics of memory in Berlin. See Till, The New Berlin; Karen Till, Place and the Politics of Memory: A Geo-Ethnography of Museums and Memorials in Berlin (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1996); and among many others, Koshar, Rudy, From Monuments to Traces: The Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Confino, Alon, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Alon Confino and Fritzsche, Peter, eds., The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

17 Again, to be fair, those who have written on Berlin and its memory culture, including Karen Till and Janet Ward, have explicitly recognized the extent to which focal points of the “new Berlin,” for example, the new Potsdamer Platz or the new Reichstag, are very much packaged and performed for consumption, and do not represent anything approaching authenticity.

18 See Durth, Werner, Düwel, Jörn, and Gutschow, Niels, Architektur und Städtebau der DDR (Frankfurt: Campus, 1998)Google Scholar; and Düwel, Jörn and Gutschow, Niels, Städtebau in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert. Ideen, Projekte, Akteure (Stuttgart: Teubner, 2001)Google Scholar; Butter, Andreas, Neues Leben, Neues Bauen. Die Moderne in der Architektur der SBZ/DDR 1945–1951 (Berlin: Schiler, 2006)Google Scholar; and Butter, Andreas and Hartung, Ulrich, Ostmoderne. Architektur in Berlin, 1945–1965 (Munich: Jovis/Deutsche Werkbund e.V., 2005)Google Scholar; and Palutzki, Joachim, Architektur der DDR (Berlin: Reimer, 2000)Google Scholar. Among others, see Colomb, Claire, Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989 (New York: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar.

19 Berlin und seine Bauten (Berlin: DOM, 2009)Google Scholar; and Berlin Urban Design: A Brief History, trans. Disko, Sasha (Berlin: DOM, 2010)Google Scholar. Bernhardt, Christoph and Wolfes, Thomas, eds., Schönheit und Typenprojektierung. Der DDR-Städtebau im internationalen Kontext (Erkner: Institut für Regionalentwicklung und Strukturplanung, 2005)Google Scholar; and Hain, Simone, ed., Warum zum Beispiel die Stalinallee? Beiträge zu einer Transformationsgeschichte des modernen Planens und Bauens (Erkner: Institut für Regionalentwicklung und Strukturplanung, 1999)Google Scholar.

20 Soja, Ed, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 3.

21 Soja, Ed, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2011), 31–45Google Scholar.

22 Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 3.

23 Harvey, David, “The Geopolitics of Capitalism,” in Social Relations and Spatial Structures, ed. Gregory, Derek and Urry, John (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1985), 126–63Google Scholar, as well as Harvey, David, Consciousness and the Urban Experience (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, quoted in Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 65.

24 This has been the case as well in the field of history, including the history of Germany and Berlin; for example, works such as Hake's Topologies of Class and Webber's Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography, for all their other virtues, are not really about topography in a truly spatial, physical sense.

25 As well taken as Lefebvre's critique was at the time (the early 1970s), certain major figures in the “linguistic” or post-structuralist turn did in fact evolve back toward understanding the importance of real, physical space, including notably Michel Foucault, as both Soja and Tim Cresswell have written on extensively. See Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 62–63; Cresswell, Tim, Space: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004)Google Scholar; and Cresswell, Tim, Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)Google Scholar.

26 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 6.

27 Ibid., 11.

28 Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 4.

29 Richie, Faust's Metropolis, 169.

30 Among the growing literature on the history of Turkish immigrants in Berlin and in other German cities in recent years, see Mandel, Ruth, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaya, Ayhan, “German-Turkish Transnational Space: A Space of their Own,” German Studies Review 30, no. 3 (Oct. 2007): 483–502Google Scholar; Petzen, Jennifer, “Home or Homelike? Turkish Queers Manage Space in Berlin,” Space and Culture 7, no. 1 (2004): 20–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Aygün, Seref and Baz, Abdul F., eds., Ganz Oben. Türken in Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Wirtschaftsverlag, 2002)Google Scholar.

31 Roseman, Mark, Gregor, Neil, and Roemer, Nils, eds., German History from the Margins (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006)Google Scholar is a very useful entrée into some of this work, as is, of course, Confino, Alon, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

32 Wietog, Jutta, “Wohnungsstandard der Unterschichten in Berlin,” in Arbeiterexistenz im 19. Jahrhundert. Lebensstandard und Lebensgestaltung deutscher Arbeiter und Handwerker, ed. Conze, Werner and Engelhardt, Ulrich (Stuttgart: Klett-Cota, 1981), 114–137Google Scholar, 125, and 133.

33 Richie, Faust's Metropolis, 164.

34 See Reichhardt, Hans and Schäche, Wolfgang, Von Berlin Nach Germania. Über die Zerstörungen der “Reichshauptstadt” durch Albert Speers Neugestaltungsplanungen (Berlin: Transit Buchverlag, 1998)Google Scholar, which ties the deportations of Jews from the Grunewald station directly to Albert Speer's forced eviction of Jews to make room for bombing victims, 172.

35 Smith, Neil, “Foreword,” in In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Metabolism, ed. Heynen, Nik, Kaika, Maria, and Swyngedouw, Erik (New York: Routledge, 2006), xiiiGoogle Scholar.

36 Kowarik, Ingo, “Wild Urban Woodlands: Towards a Conceptual Framework,” in Wild Urban Woodlands, ed. Kowarik, Ingo and Körner, Stefan (Berlin: Springer, 2005), 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited in Gandy, Matthew, “Interstitial Landscapes: Reflections on a Berlin Corner,” in Urban Constellations, ed. Gandy, Matthew (Berlin: Jovis, 2011)Google Scholar.

37 See Hard, Gerhard, Ruderalvegetation. Ökologie und Ethnoökologie, Ästhetik und “Schutz” (Kassel: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Freiraum und Vegetation, Notizbuch der Kasseler Schule, 1998)Google Scholar. See also Lachmund, Jens, Greening Berlin: The Co-Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 65Google Scholar; Sukopp, Herbert, Blume, Hans-Peter, and Kunick, Wolfram, “The Soil, Flora, and Vegetation of Berlin's Waste Lands,” in Nature in Cities: The Natural Environment in the Design and Development of Urban Green Space, ed. Laurie, Ian C. (Chichester and New York: Wiley, 1979), 115–32Google Scholar; and Ellenberg, Heinz, Vegetation Ecology of Central Europe, trans. Strutt, Gordon K., 4th ed. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 617 ffGoogle Scholar.

38 See especially Gandy, Matthew's pathbreaking Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Brantz, Dorothee and Dümpelmann, Sonja, eds., Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011)Google Scholar; and Brantz, Dorothee, with Disko, Sasha and Wagner-Kyora, Georg, eds., Thick Space: Approaches to Metropolitanism (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also her coauthored introductions to each volume.

39 Cronon, William, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992)Google Scholar. Harvey, David, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 186–7Google Scholar. He echoed earlier sentiments by, among others, Jane Jacobs. This point was made by Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw in “Urban Political Ecology: Politicizing the Production of Urban Natures,” which is their introductory essay to their edited volume In the Nature of Cities, 1–20.

40 Gandy, “Interstitial Landscapes, 150.

41 Ibid., 151.

42 See Lachmund, Greening Berlin, and also Lachmund, Jens, “Exploring the City of Rubble: Botanical Fieldwork in Bombed Cities in Germany after World War II,” Osiris 18 (2003): 234–254CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

43 Bettina Stoetzer, “At the Forest Edges of the City: Nature, Race and National Belonging in Berlin” (Ph.D. diss., University of California Santa Cruz, 2011). Stoetzer's dissertation is a forthcoming manuscript entitled Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration and Urban Life in Berlin.